The San Antonio Spurs, not quite ready to be written off as too old and too slow to claim an NBA crown, routed the Los Angeles Clippers 115-90.

Manu Ginobili scored 24 points, leading six Spurs players who scored in double figures.

DeJuan Blair added 20 and Richard Jefferson chipped in 19. Tony Parker scored 14 points with nine assists, Tim Duncan scored 10 with eight rebounds and James Anderson added 12 off the bench as the Spurs shot 56.3 percent from the field.

The Spurs also made all 15 of their free throws, but coach Gregg Popovich said defense was the real key to the victory.

“Shots went in tonight,” Popovich said. “That’s what happens. Some nights they don’t drop. Tonight the best part of our game was defense.”

And that’s what was lacking for the Clippers, coach Vinny Del Negro said.

“Give San Antonio credit — they were cutting hard, they were moving the basketball, we were very stagnant,” he said. “We weren’t physical. We weren’t contesting shots…

“We played terrible, just from start to finish tonight,” Del Negro said. “We had a little glimpse in the second quarter, I thought we did some good things. But they jumped on us in the third and we were just chasing them the rest of the game.”

The Clippers have been touted as a potential new power in the Western Conference after the arrival of All-Star point guard Chris Paul to team with Blake Griffin, the explosive talent who earned Rookie of the Year honors last season.

Griffin led the Clippers with 28 points, while Paul scored 10 on 3-of-10 shooting.

The Spurs, long a Western Conference force, won 61 games last season but were surprised in the first round of the playoffs by a young, energetic Memphis team, sparking predictions that the team led by 35-year-old Duncan and featuring 34-year-old Ginobili and 29-year-old Parker had passed their prime.

In their first two games of this lockout-shortened season, however, the Spurs have now beaten both Memphis and the Clippers.

San Antonio led by as many as 12 points before Griffin capped a Clippers surge by soaring for a basket that knotted the score at 52-52 late in the second quarter.

A Ginobili three-pointer saw the Spurs take a 58-54 lead at halftime, and San Antonio took firm control in the third period, when they out-scored Los Angeles by 21 points to take a 96-71 lead.

The comfortable victory meant Popovich was able to give his stars some rest. Duncan played 25 minutes, Parker 26 and Ginobili 27.

“You wouldn’t trade it,” Popovich said of the luxury of resting his veterans for significant minutes. It could prove especially important in the hectic, lockout-shortened season. The Spurs were due back in action on Thursday night at Houston.

“It was a good night for us, and to get some rest was surely welcome,” Popovich said.

The San Antonio Spurs, not quite ready to be written off as too old and too slow to claim an NBA crown, routed the Los Angeles Clippers 115-90 Wednesday.

Manu Ginobili scored 24 points, leading six Spurs players who scored in double figures.

DeJuan Blair added 20 and Richard Jefferson chipped in 19. Tony Parker scored 14 points with nine assists, Tim Duncan scored 10 with eight rebounds and James Anderson added 12 off the bench as the Spurs shot 56.3 percent from the field.

The Spurs also made all 15 of their free throws, but coach Gregg Popovich said defense was the real key to the victory.

“Shots went in tonight,” Popovich said. “That’s what happens. Some nights they don’t drop. Tonight the best part of our game was defense.”

And that’s what was lacking for the Clippers, coach Vinny Del Negro said.

“Give San Antonio credit — they were cutting hard, they were moving the basketball, we were very stagnant,” he said. “We weren’t physical. We weren’t contesting shots…

“We played terrible, just from start to finish tonight,” Del Negro said. “We had a little glimpse in the second quarter, I thought we did some good things. But they jumped on us in the third and we were just chasing them the rest of the game.”

The Clippers have been touted as a potential new power in the Western Conference after the arrival of All-Star point guard Chris Paul to team with Blake Griffin, the explosive talent who earned Rookie of the Year honors last season.

Griffin led the Clippers with 28 points, while Paul scored 10 on 3-of-10 shooting.

The Spurs, long a Western Conference force, won 61 games last season but were surprised in the first round of the playoffs by a young, energetic Memphis team, sparking predictions that the team led by 35-year-old Duncan and featuring 34-year-old Ginobili and 29-year-old Parker had passed their prime.

In their first two games of this lockout-shortened season, however, the Spurs have now beaten both Memphis and the Clippers.

San Antonio led by as many as 12 points before Griffin capped a Clippers surge by soaring for a basket that knotted the score at 52-52 late in the second quarter.

A Ginobili three-pointer saw the Spurs take a 58-54 lead at halftime, and San Antonio took firm control in the third period, when they out-scored Los Angeles by 21 points to take a 96-71 lead.

The comfortable victory meant Popovich was able to give his stars some rest. Duncan played 25 minutes, Parker 26 and Ginobili 27.

“You wouldn’t trade it,” Popovich said of the luxury of resting his veterans for significant minutes. It could prove especially important in the hectic, lockout-shortened season. The Spurs were due back in action on Thursday night at Houston.

“It was a good night for us, and to get some rest was surely welcome,” Popovich said.

SAN ANTONIO — At times, the Grizzlies looked like they were just getting acquainted with each other. And that’s because they were, with a rotation that counted on a couple of players who joined the team in the last 72 hours.

Then there were times — too many for the coaching staff to stomach — when the Griz just stumbled and miscarried on both ends of the court.

Instead of looking like the squad that gelled into a playoff darling last season, the Griz opened the 2011-12 season Monday night in ragged fashion and with a 95-82 loss to the San Antonio Spurs in the AT&T Center.

At the crux of the Grizzlies’ problems were 25 turnovers and uninspired defense.

“It’s frustrating because we know what we’re capable of,” Griz forward Rudy Gay said after finishing with a team-high 19 points and 10 rebounds. “With the talent we have in this room we can play with anybody and we didn’t show it.”

Manu Ginobili’s 24 points led the Spurs, who also enjoyed a 15-point, seven-assist outing by Tony Parker.

In a rematch of the teams’ 2011 first-round playoff series, the Spurs were methodical. The Griz, however, showed they need more time to re-establish chemistry even though they returned the core players.

Griz forward Zach Randolph dominated the Spurs last spring in the postseason but was held to 10 points and six rebounds. He only attempted eight shots with the Spurs effectively crowding the paint.

“They didn’t do anything special,” Randolph said. “We just have to know what we want to do. We’ve got to get our identity. We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to play.”

Griz coach Lionel Hollins agreed, saying the Spurs only employed the same pack-the-paint strategy that the Griz saw most of last season.

“Everybody does,” Hollins said. “They don’t fear us out on the perimeter. … The Spurs came out in the second half and just imposed their will on us.”

The Griz trailed 52-49 with 8:13 left in the third quarter when they lost total control. They got overwhelmed by the Spurs’ 21-3 run, which included 16 unanswered points.

San Antonio took a 19-point advantage and the lead dipped below double digits for only 20 seconds in the fourth quarter. When the Spurs didn’t drive-and-kick for 10 3-pointers, they scored easily off fast breaks.

“We were very active. We crowded things,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. “We got back in transition and we got our hands on a lot of balls. We did a good job of that and it fueled the break back the other way.”

Credit the Spurs’ defense. But the Griz also just handed over the ball.

“They force the ball, play in a crowd, make bad decisions,” Hollins said of his team’s turnovers.

Point guard Mike Conley started the fourth quarter by losing his dribble to Parker on consecutive possessions.

Tony Allen had four turnovers mostly by losing his dribble in a crowd of defenders. One possession in the third period saw Allen turn a dynamic offensive rebound into an offensive foul. Allen was looking to score while open teammates called for the ball at the top of the key.

“I don’t mind the ones when we’re trying to make the extra pass,” Griz center Marc Gasol said. “The ones we have to cut down on are the ones when we’re trying to go 1 on 4.”

Memphis led 44-43 at halftime after it had led by 10 in the opening period. The Griz undermined 53-percent shooting by committing 15 turnovers in the first half.

“I don’t think we’re playing with the pace we need to play with,” Conley said. “We’re not moving the ball from side to side and there’s indecision with our second and third options. There’s no doubt we have to get better.”

— Ronald Tillery: (901) 529-2353

Grizzlies vs. San Antonio Spurs

AT&T Center, San Antonio, 7:30 p.m.

TV, radio: SportSouth, WMFS 92.9-FM/680-AM

Records: This is the season opener for both teams.

Lineups

Grizzlies: Mike Conley, 6-1, Tony Allen, 6-4, Rudy Gay, 6-8, Zach Randolph, 6-9, Marc Gasol, 7-1.

Spurs: Tony Parker, 6-2, Manu Ginobili, 6-6, Richard Jefferson, 6-7, Tim Duncan, 6-11, Tiago Splitter, 6-11.

THE SKINNY

The Grizzlies will begin their most anticipated season in Memphis on the road against the team they ejected from the playoffs last season. Memphis began its historic playoff run by eliminating top-seeded San Antonio in the first round. This rematch of that series will feature most of the same players, as neither team dramatically changed its roster. Last season, San Antonio finished tied with Chicago for the NBA’s best home record at 36-5. But the Western Conference is changing. Memphis and San Antonio split four regular-season meetings in 2010-11, though the Spurs have won 14 of the last 16 matchups at home including the playoffs.

– Ronald Tillery

The Spurs didn’t find an upgrade from Richard Jefferson after the lockout, and in a sign of how badly they need big men, couldn’t talk 37-year-old Antonio McDyess into playing another season.

That leaves Duncan, entering his 15th season and the end of his contract, making perhaps his last try for a fifth title with largely the same group that hasn’t come close lately.

“This is basically the same team,” Duncan said. “We have as good an opportunity as anyone else. We have that experience a lot of people are going to work for.”

Duncan arrived at training camp insisting he’s not yet thinking about retirement. He’ll be 36 when the playoffs roll around and will make $21 million this season, behind only Kobe Bryant ($25 million) and Rashard Lewis ($22 million).

The big payday is Duncan’s reward for making the Spurs the winningest franchise in major professional sports the past 14 years, surpassing even the New England Patriots or New York Yankees in winning percentage. Even last year, against all expectations, the Spurs won 61 games and reclaimed the Western Conference’s top seed.

It still wasn’t good enough.

It was easy to read into San Antonio’s first-round loss as more than an upset. The Memphis Grizzlies, quick and big, made the Spurs look slow and small.

Weeks after losing to Memphis in six games, Parker was in Paris telling French journalists that was the last chance for the aging Spurs, whose last title was in 2007. “We will always have a good team but can no longer say we’re playing for a championship,” he said.

Parker later backed away from those remarks, and returned to San Antonio this month with a cheerier outlook.

“A lot of young teams are coming up, so we just have to make sure we can keep up and be competitive,” Parker said. “You have to be positive and you have to believe in your team. I definitely believe in my team. Hopefully we can stay healthy and not have those little bumps like last year.”

If San Antonio does have another run left in them, it’ll be up to mostly the same cast. That includes Jefferson, who survived last week’s amnesty deadline after the Spurs had a chance to part ways with the underachieving swingman who is due $9.2 million this season.

The Spurs courted free agents Caron Butler and Josh Howard. Though after it became apparent Jefferson would make it to opening day, Spurs coach Gregg Popovich defended his starting small forward as an improving defender and reliable 3-point shooter.

“It’s kind of interesting. Everybody always asked about amnesty, and I always wondered why Richard, Richard, Richard,” Popovich said. “As if we didn’t advance in the playoffs because of Richard. I don’t think anybody played great.”

Be that as it may, the Spurs may have landed Jefferson’s eventual replacement in rookie Kawhi Leonard. Selected 15th overall by Indiana, the 6-foot-7 forward was dealt in a draft-day trade for guard George Hill, who was Parker’s backup and a budding star in the Popovich’s eyes.

Yet it was a price Popovich says he was willing to pay. The 20-year-old Leonard brings not only youth and size but a knack for defense, which Popovich is reprioritizing after the Spurs were — rather atypically — better known for outscoring teams than stopping them last season.

Parker (17.5 points per game) and 34-year-old Ginobili (17.4 points) will again drive San Antonio’s offense from the backcourt, and veteran T.J. Ford replaces Hill off the bench. The frontcourt is a larger concern: with McDyess gone, the big men left are 3-point marksman Matt Bonner, undersized 6-foot-7 center DeJuan Blair and 7-footer Tiago Splitter.

Then there’s Duncan. The two-time MVP, whose scoring and rebounding (13.4 and 8.9) were career lows last year, is the only Spurs player left from the 1999 team that won the franchise’s first championship in that lockout-shortened season.

Duncan draws no comparisons to then and now. He just knows the toll awaiting him in the compressed schedule ahead.

“It wasn’t a grind to me then,” Duncan recalled of 1999. “I was running like a deer up and down every day. I wanted to play. But this is going to feel different, I know it.”

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